(Fractal reverb. Not unlike Infinite Cat. Courtesy of theLaika and Creative Commons.)
All too often, employees, managers and businesses sit on ideas too long. Mulling them over... Perfecting them... Polishing them... Yeah, polishing them. But most businesses don't make money from sitting on ideas. They make money from getting them designed and launched.
Innovation loves velocity, especially thoughtful velocity.
In this context, thoughtful velocity translates into considered experimentation with an earnest desire to discover new facts and to evolve based on what you learn.
With that in mind, I put forth* another innovation measure: Time to First Feedback (TFF)
Time to First Feedback is the time (measured in days) for an idea in the form of a prototype to be presented to a real-live user (RLU) for honest reaction.
There would be levels for TFF, like in the Capability Maturity Model, based on orders of magnitude, like the Richter scale:
Level 0 < 730 days
1 < 365 days
2 < 90 days
3 < 5 days
4 < .5 days
What's your organization's TFF Level? What would it take to raise it a level?
Let's scrutinize this for a minute...
Why not time to first prototype? Because I've walked around many a corporation and seen passable prototypes that "just weren't quite ready for sharing yet." You have to prototype something to get feedback anyway. It's like Prego, it's in there.
Isn't time to market what matters? Yes and no. In some organizations, TFF can equal the time to market. If you're living in beta, this is good. If you aren't living in beta, this is bad. That likely means you've missed numerous opportunities to evolve your offering for the better and significantly mitigate your risk.
What about Apple? They don't show anybody anything. You're not Apple.
Does it still make sense to track Time to Market? Absolutely. After all, you're in it to ship. Which made me think...
There's definitely evidence to suggest that you can be too early to market. But, I wonder whether companies that possess ungodly thoughtful velocity can prototype evolve and refine right through until the timing is right?
* Well, elevate actually. Some organizations do indeed track things that are close to this, but as far as I can tell, it is not widely prevalent.
